Posts by Jon 52

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footballs coming home

I think fotoball chants are a good pointer, and what is more iconic than Frank Skinenr et al "3 lions".

Just try getting "footballs coming home" out your head now. Yes, this was deliberatly written to be catchy and it succeded. So well that many of the "catchy" football songs of following years, where just utter failures compared to this monolith with fans opting to sing "its coming".

its bollocks

When I was in high school 15 years ago they made the french teacher do ICT as she had some computer experience ( i think she had one of those word processor units). Meanwhile we had been programming our BBC micro in primary school, she asked me one day how I got the little * above the 8, so I showed her the shift key.

I stopped caring at that point and just rushed the whole years work off in about 1 week and still got top marks. A bunch of us formed our own computer "club" in lessons and taught ourselves programming and advanced office techniques from books and computer magazines. While the other half the class struggled with copy/paste.

To be fair to the teacher she recognised the status quo was rubbish and encouraged us to do this.

you gave permission

Didn't you read evreyword in the 16000 word EULA it clearly gives them permission to track you and share this info with whoever they like. You clicked the agree button or opened the shrink wrap or whatever so you did agree to this.

just cause he didn't fix it

I got to know numerous security flaws in my companies systems, when I pointed some out, the Defect Review Board decided many wern't cost effective to fix (not enough people would find them, and/or you would have to really know the code to find anyway (woo security by obscurity).

it already wins on content

I like content on digital radio and made me go out and get a digital radio (when I don't listen online).

however this is placed in my kitchen plugged in (I had to struggle to find a location to get anything, Icould put my old FM anywhere)

reception is the problem, the digital cliff is too much, you either get it perfectly or move an inch and get nothing.

The good thing about my portable FM i take jogging is I can always hear a whole ong all the way through (yes I may get an odd hiss evreynow and then but at least it is not 10sec of silence) and the batteries never need replacing.

confirmation bias

>If it comes out appearing to be Plausible or Confirmed, then you put out your results to Peer Review

ans somtimes you should publish the negative results, otherwise you get confirmation bias. where there are 1 study that proved x and was published and 99 studies that disporved x but were never published.

car analogy

An open source car is like a car in the 50s yes it would be eaiser and cheper (once learnt) for me to maintain if it had the simple mechanical parts of yesteryear.

However I drive a modern car as it has better fuel economy and is more reliable with less inteference from me. However I take the hit in the fact there are no user servicable parts in the engine and even to change a headlight virtually requries a mechanic to access it.

Apple dictate any price.

"But again they are not saying what the price is but that it must be the same as on the content providers site, to me this is a way to ensure Apple customers are not ripped off paying more for the use of it on their idDevice."

But that means that non-iDevice people need ripping off. If companyA needs to sell its thing at £7 to make profit, they would have to sell it for £10 on iStore. But could afford to sell it for £7 on their own website. Now they have to charge evreyone £10.

quake vs tsunami

The quake didnt do that much damage so the arguemnt 8.2vs 9.0 is slightly less important than the tsunami predicion. It was 7m not the 6.5m in spec, it was the basement flooding that meant loss of backup power (a lot of switch gear in the basement.)

If they had thought to put the generators higher in the building to prevent flooding it would have been better

based on what

yep

I retired from hacking at the age of 16 when I left school. I was a pretty good little script kiddie back in the day.. scourge of school admins (not hard when they barely knew how the shift key worked)

yep payg want address too

When you first connect they ask for an address although one is not needed, to get a top-up card they ask for an address, to top up online you have to enter an address, to benfit from oranges "phone fund" where orange give you a small amount each top up to get a new phone you have t ogive an address.

type of car

I disagree that type of car could become protected on gender bounds.

As a man I drive a "womens" car (even the toyota yaris ads sell it as such ("her yaris")). I chose this car as it is cheap to insure (and has excellent fuel economy). I have free choice over the type of car and can make that choice, and probably by the fact I make that choice shows I am less likily to cause a high value claim caring more about cost than performance. Where I cannot change my gender to get cheaper insurance (I assume sex change does not matter to insureres?) I can change my car.

agree mostly but not on car type

I buy a car with a smaller engine, and less desirable to theives as iwant lower insurance premiums. Why shouldn't insureres be allowed to assess risk for the price, attractiveness of the car. Also if a car is safer and less likily to be in an accident then why can't they charge lower.

fagsnbooze

The market forces in this case are majority A-level school leavers who want a blast at university and just have a simple life doing somthing fun. I think less than half of all students will actually seriously look at job markets before going off to Uni and base their decisiion on that, even less will make this decision at 16 when choosing A-levels and less than that at 14 when you choose triple or only double science.

marketing

The marketing department should now evreything going on with their comapany and what people are saying about it. If they hadn't heard about the recent cases of their company being hacked, they arent usefull to the company.

Nuclear Vessles

They have known about this for years, yet it is only once conficker has done its dirty work on Iranian Nuclear Facilities do they finally close the loophole. The tinfoiler in me thinks it was left open on purpose...

its not a case of £44 unit

If they had laid 2 wires along the track for a cost of £88 then the theives would have just doubled their profits.

When our signalling cable was stolen they got it working again in less than a day. That is Discover fault in morning, run some tests remotely, find send crew out to see why failed, crew measure how much wire is missing crew call back that wire is missing, send another crew with skills and materials to fix wire, fix wire, test wire, check safety, get trains and crews back to where they should be.

Also should not just look at cost. If I took six £0.20 bolts of the hub of your car even with triple redudency then your car would be useless until you fix it.

I hate train ompanies as much as the next guy being on southeastern, but this is one fault that should lie with the theif not the network.

units

It is more accurate to use the native figures as you do not need to apply exchange rates of the exact time the figure was quoted. If you want to look up the excahgne rate go ahead. But the costs were to Britain, and orignally calculated in £. The market rates are always in $ and in some ways are a different unit.

coalition agreement

The Libdems negotiated to be allowed to Abstain on the fees issue, to keep their pledge not to vote for higher fees. However as tory back benchers also hated the fees certain lib dems were needed to vote for, so they were whipped into voting for a policy they pormised they would not.

decitful microshaft

I'd always asumed the same the advert models were represnting people who had left feedback to microsoft (or microsoft had some sort of Focus Group event and got ideas from idiots who have time to spare to attend focus groups)

Then it turns out microsoft are saying that the ideas were deceitfully stolen from other people and put into windows 7, same old microshaft... buy 'em out boys!

crb fail

The other problem with a crb certificate is it is only valid at the point the check was made. There was plans for a new system, a photocard with a reference number on. This ref could then quickly be checked by any organisation to do a search at that point, then register their interest to recieve updates if anything happened. However this was too costly to implement.

perhaps rovio could make a buck

in the console world microsoft paid developers to transfer to xbox platform. Perhaps roxio think they can be paid to develope for win mobile. Or perahps Nokia even gave them some funding to appear with them at the ovi bash.

biggest batttery use

I find the biggest battery use by far to be the screen (backlight). If you leave this on auto I could last 4 hours of web browsing/ gaming. However If I turn it down (even to lowest setting when inside) I could use the phone but got about 6hrs constant use.

Ok how about jsut a house share

When I started working I couldn't afford to live on my own and knew noone where I was moving to. I got a house share. 4 months later the I found out the livin landlord had not been paying any bills on the house for about 15months (even though the other 3 of us had been paying her money each month we had been there (bills were in her name only). What if our bills had been bundled with hers, we could then be listed as "linked" in any credit record and would probably be liable to pay more of her debt.

ban ie6 to boost the economy

We should ban IE6 to provide a boost to the economy. If people with net access at work can't get to their favourite sites like friendface or constantly check their Yahoo! mails or read and comment on el reg allday because they are stuck on 6 (and cannot give legitamate rason to upgrade) then we will actaully have to do some work and be profitable to the company, it will save companies millions, of course unemployment will climb as companies realise cubicle farms can actually run on 2/3 of the staff.

Of course sites like amazon and ebay will lose out in sales to high street chains as people shop outside on thier lunchbreaks)

mcdonalds

If I show up to mcdonalds in my horse and cart I am probably too high to reach the window so your saying they should build a special high window just for us few horse and cart users, and have someone on permanant standby to shovel up all our shit.

TIMEZONES

Time zones are even trickeir whan the device itself moves, at least flight book people and airports stay still. I have ships moving accross the globe (crossing the dateline is fun) with local to ship time, local to port time and UTC.

I can't wait for worldwide decimal time in UTC, just go to bed at 4am in USA and 8am in Australia.